SEVEN months ago Nizar Mhani was a dentist living and working in Wales with no history of political activism.

But since then the 30-year-old, from Cardiff’s Heath suburb, has returned to his native Libya, where he has waged an underground campaign of civil disobedience and protest in Tripoli that has made him one of the Gaddafi regime’s most wanted figures.

While the world’s media was held captive in the capital’s Rixos hotel, it was Nizar who broadcast to the world that the revolution was growing, despite the regime’s efforts to stamp it out.

He has been denounced on state-run television as a rat who must be found and hanged and seen members of his family threatened.

When the rebels’ uprising spread to the Libyan capital Tripoli in February, Mhani packed a bag and jumped on a plane, only to find that the protest movement he had hoped to find was in danger of foundering, in a city where fear of retribution from the regime was rife.

In a bid to reignite the protest movement he began speaking out against Gaddafi and proudly unfurled the rebel flag across Tripoli, right under the regime’s nose, and blasted the old national anthem on street corners.

With a friend, he hacked into a government computer system and then stole a satellite dish to share his defiant acts with a global audience – and defy the internet crackdown the dictator had installed.

Nizar told the Washington Post: “I wanted to really annoy the regime by doing something they most hate, and that is telling people what is really going on.

“The fact it annoyed them so much means we must have done something right.”

He staged demonstrations – always appearing in a scarf to conceal his identity – and denounced the regime on camera. He communicated with journalists in the country via e-mail and Twitter, firstly under his real name, later assuming an ancient family surname, Ben-Essa, as an alias and, with his cousin and two close friends, founded the Free Generation Movement.

Nizar’s cousin Mukhtar Mhani, at only 26, was a government IT expert who Nizar said hacked into the government’s still-functioning intranet system and used it to access a government satellite dish to transmit messages of protest to the outside world.

But as their prominence grew, the group realised they could be tracked down through the intranet route, so they went to Mukhtar’s workplace, climbed to the roof and found a 1.8-meter satellite dish.

“We needed a satellite connection, so we dismantled it. Then we took a deep breath, and we just walked out,” he told the Post.

Fortunately for them, his was one of many government offices abandoned after the start of the Libyan uprising.

Within the Mhani family there were conflicting arguments. “One day they would say, ‘You are writing our family name in history’,” he said. “The next day they would say, ‘It is not serving any purpose’.”

Eventually an informer gave the group up. He and other leaders were at a safe house, but Gaddafi’s troops targeted their families.

Nizar’s cousin Hamza was arrested on July 24 and said he was given electric shocks while in custody. He was told he would be held until Nazir gave himself up, while security forces threatened to take the children of Mhani’s sister away.

The activist began taking further precautions, pretending via Twitter and e-mail that he had moved to Tunisia and was doing humanitarian work.

His photograph was circulated by the regime to local mosques, but believing that the end of Gaddafi’s rule was close, he kept going. Eventually, he realised that the regime he feared so much was in disarray.

“It turns out the regime structure we feared so much was as useless as the rest of the country is,” he said.

Then, exactly six months after the Tripoli uprising began, the city rose and was liberated. But Nizar’s joy was short-lived, as his cousin Suleiman Zaheer Mhani was shot dead by Gaddafi forces after being one of the first to come out into the streets that day.

“I feel like I can finally sleep, like I haven’t slept for six months,” he told the Post.

“But now is when the work begins. We have so many problems. We had a lot of problems before, but now we have the freedom to fix them, so we have no excuse.”